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Life is but a daily oscillation between revolt and submission.
Knowledge, love, power-there is the complete life.
Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.
Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.
Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.
If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.
It is dangerous to abandon one's self to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.
In order to see Christianity, one must forget all the Christians.
Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.
Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.
A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word, he must be able to simplify his duties, his business and his life.
He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions-such a man is . . . a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being-an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner-life is a slave of his surroundings as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air.
The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists - in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.
Are we not all shipwrecked,...condemned to death?... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults.
A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.
Happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.
To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.
To feel keenly the poetry of a morning's roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness.
There is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good.
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